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"Universal Jigsaw Puzzle" Hits Stores In Japan

Posted by timothy on from the fools-the-eye dept.

Riktov writes "I came across this at a Tokyo toy store last week, and it's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Jigazo Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle, but you can make anything with it. It has just 300 pieces which are all just varying shades of a single color, though a few have gradations across the piece; i.e., each piece is a generic pixel. Out of the box, you can make Mona Lisa, JFK, etc, arranging it according to symbols printed on the reverse side. But here's the amazing thing: take a photo (for example, of yourself) with a cell-phone, e-mail it to the company, and they will send you back a pattern that will recreate that photo. This article is in Japanese, but as they say, a few pictures are worth a million words. And 300 pixels are worth an infinite number of pictures."

5 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. JPEG by Quietust · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Seems remarkably similar to how JPEG compression works. Not surprisingly, the resulting pictures look a lot like overcompressed JPEGs.

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  2. Not quite. by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It appears to be monochromatic and it also used nearest-approximation algorithms... Which means that the extra pieces are inserted as "random noise" once the general shapes are mapped out. Clever, but... low resolution.

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    1. Re:Not quite. by Kazoo+the+Clown · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It essentially has a fixed histogram. I wonder what you'd get back from them if you sent them an image specifically designed to be hard to fit into that histogram...

  3. Re:puzzle? by Red+Flayer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I had something similar as a kid, but there were two colors of varying saturation. Grey (from black to white), and gold (from almost white to intensely saturated). The pieces were different shapes, though, so there was a puzzle aspect to it, though all the pieces were some number of squares in different configurations (like tetris pieces, but more shapes in different sizes of 1 to 10 or so squares).

    It came with a few patterns to copy from (tiger, city landscape, I can't recall the others, since I never did them).

    Unfortunately, there was no www at the time, so no website to submit pictures to for patterns. One of my brothers did make some nice pictures based on photographs.

    The memory is a bit hazy, but I know the company that made it was asian (I remember there were pictograms and poorly translate English on the box).

    I know, I know -- cool story bro.

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    "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
  4. Re:puzzle? by shentino · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd swear that it almost looks like a tool to teach someone about basic JPEG encoding.